The Memory Key (29 page)

Professor Pitagora crossed himself. ‘God rest her wretched soul.’

The captain bowed his head. ‘Amen,’ he said, and stole a triumphant glance at Blume.

Chapter 30

Blume, Pitagora, and Zezza sat in silence, nodding their heads slightly like three wise men contemplating the transience of life. Blume felt his headache rising and beginning to cloud thoughts that had seemed clear only moments before. The murder of Manfellotto, if that’s what it was, caused him fresh doubt.

Pitagora asked the question for him. ‘Is foul play suspected?’

‘It is too early to say,’ said Zezza, still unable to stop smirking at Blume. ‘I saw the scene. A sheet, blood, a half-naked old woman lying in a cold courtyard. Then I went up and looked at where she fell from, and it gave me the shivers, because I do not like heights. I can’t imagine anyone willingly going out there, especially in this slippery miserable weather. But then again, she was no longer sane. So, once the magistrate came along, I came here, leaving her and the technicians to look at the circumstantial evidence.’

‘You left the crime scene just like that?’ asked Blume. He was angered in equal measure by Zezza’s attitude towards him and by his disrespect for Manfellotto. He was angry at being made to look wrong. He probably had been wrong, and Manfellotto had always been the target. The whole thing was about her. It certainly looked that way now.

‘I was there for forty minutes, and I’m going back. No, Commissioner, you can’t come.’

‘I don’t want to, I trust in your expertise. But I am not sure I believe you when you say you have not formed any opinions. Not even a preliminary idea, Captain?’ said Blume.

‘Her face was a terrible mess,’ said the captain leaning back and looking at Blume. ‘Like a huge overripe plum.’

‘And her arms?’

The professor was looking back and forth between them like a tennis spectator. ‘What are you trying to say, Commissioner?’

‘I see that when the professor has a question, he asks you,’ said Zezza. ‘Have you been briefing him, maybe explaining your theory to him?’

Blume did not reply, but the professor, sounding like a plaintive child, said, ‘Can someone answer me?’

Blume turned to him and snapped, ‘If you were going to throw some poor fucker off a balcony –’

‘A fire escape,’ corrected Zezza.

‘A fire escape,’ continued Blume without missing a beat, ‘there is a very good chance that they would drag you over, too. Or at least cause a hell of a fuss, a bit like you’re doing now. Even if they were small and weak. So rather than grapple on the ledge, the best way to do it would be to knock them out first, or stun them, then throw.’

‘Good God,’ said Pitagora. ‘Poor Stefania.’

‘Actually it’s a mercy, because she was almost certainly unconscious as she fell. She will have suffered less,’ said Blume, pinching his eyes shut.

‘Let us pray that it was so,’ said the professor who looked thoroughly aghast at what he was hearing. Through the thickening fog of his headache, Blume noticed the tremor and fear in the professor’s voice, and saw Zezza was noticing it, too.

‘I think that’s probably how it went, Professor,’ said Blume more gently. ‘If she was unconscious she would not have instinctively tried to shield her face with her arms. That’s why particularly devastating facial injuries and intact arms suggest unconsciousness during the fall, and therefore point to murder.’

‘None of this is certain,’ said Zezza. ‘They’ll have to examine her arms, see how they are fractured. Maybe she did try to protect her face at the end.’

‘This confirms what I have been saying. She was assassinated for sure,’ said Pitagora. ‘And I am afraid I wil be next.’

‘Well, it’s interesting, though, isn’t it?’ said the captain, addressing himself to Blume. ‘I never really thought that Stefania Manfellotto had been attacked by a surviving relative of one of the victims of the train station bombing, but obviously that was the first line of investigation I was obliged to follow. For political reasons, too, you understand. I could not be seen to assume this was an internal settling of accounts among Fascists. They made me investigate civil rights movements campaigning for truth about this and the various other terrorist outrages. Now at last we can all stop pretending and focus on the Fascists, can’t we, Professor?’

Pitagora was biting a knuckle and seemed not to be following.

‘An internal settling of accounts,’ said Blume. ‘Neo-Fascists killing the whatever the opposite of neo is.’

‘
Vetero
,’ said the professor absently, and resumed his knuckle chewing.

‘Neo-Fascists killing
vetero
-Fascists, then,’ said Blume. ‘Or, more likely,
vetero
-Fascists killing each other.’ He spoke the words out loud. They made perfect sense. After all, that is what had just happened to Manfellotto, unless it actually was an accident. He had thought everyone else was looking in the wrong direction, but it was him. Was that possible?

‘I tend to agree with that second hypothesis,’ said Zezza. ‘Professor? Anything to contribute?’ When Pitagora shook his head, Zezza continued, ‘One line of inquiry regards Manfellotto’s past activities and the possibility that she was planning to betray an old confidence, reveal some secret pact. It is the most delicate because a lot of her former
camerati
reformed and acquired respectability and power, including within the hierarchy of my own force: yours too, Blume.’

‘Some didn’t reform, yet they still rose to positions of power,’ said Blume. ‘And the professor here is a fine example of just such a person. Molotov cocktails and baseball bats in the 1960s, beating up students, cooperating with organized crime, shooting people in bank raids.’

‘Alec! I reject these accusations.’ The professor sounded genuinely hurt. ‘I did know people who did these things, but I was and am and always have been a mediator.’

Zezza looked askance at Blume as the professor blurted out his first name. ‘We can look at Manfellotto’s past activities and connections, or we can look at her new connections with the neo-Fascist groups. In other words, we can look at the old, or we can look at the young. Even before the Manfellotto case the Ministries of Defence issued a circular to warn about an upswing in terrorism.’

‘I got the memo, too,’ said Blume. ‘They send one out every other year, just to make sure their budgets aren’t cut.’

‘You may not take it seriously,’ said Zezza. ‘But I do. The new groups are growing in number and strength, and it is only a matter of time before they reactivate. Terrorism is back in fashion. Already there have been several shootings of Africans by right-wing extremists. We are waiting for some atrocity, another train station, a shopping mall, a school, something like that.’

‘We?’

‘We law enforcers, Blume. Apart from the memo, the people I talk to have been saying that Italy is about to explode.’

‘Italy is always about to explode.’

‘Fortunately there are some serious men in law enforcement. If the new extremists are renewing themselves, militarily speaking, they’ll want to get rid of the old guard. I think the professor is right to be afraid,’ Zezza filled his tone with threat, ‘which makes me wonder why he is not cooperating with me more.’

By way of reply, Pitagora simply left the room. Zezza seemed about to stop him, but then relaxed.

‘He’s not going anywhere,’ he told Blume.

‘You hope not.’

‘I have reported you, you know. For interference. I did not have much choice. I hope it does not cause you too much trouble.’

Fuck you, and your big white head, Zezza
, thought Blume. He massaged the webbing of his hand, a trick Caterina had taught him to keep his headache at bay . . . Caterina.
Fuck
, he had forgotten.

The professor came back with a box of Moment tablets. ‘Always keep these handy – I forgot the water!’ He paused. ‘There is a lot of tension in this room.’

‘Thanks,’ said Blume popping five pills into his hand and then his mouth – pills, he realized, he had not asked for. ‘Never mind the water, I’ll just chew.’

‘The commissioner is leaving. He has a sick wife to visit,’ announced Zezza.

‘She’s not his wife,’ said Pitagora. He turned to Blume. ‘You were going to forget this. Don’t.’ He handed him the book. ‘There is stuff in there that cures headaches, too.’

Chapter 31

‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ When he was lucid, her father liked to quote that phrase at least once a week, as if it were an ineffable truth. She could hardly think of a less appropriate motto for a man whose forgiving nature everyone, from the neighbours to her mother and herself, took advantage of. Eventually she guessed he intended it for her, so that she might turn out tougher and less forgiving that he had been. But when the dementia began to take over and swallow up the man whose character directly rebutted his favourite phrase, many of the people whom she thought he should have forgiven less became kinder. Even the neighbour who had exploited her father’s good nature to rob, there was no other word for it, a plot of garden attached to the apartment that had once been theirs, even he turned out to have hidden reserves of generosity, going out of his way to call in favours to find the best doctors he could for them, giving her father lifts to the clinic and then the hospital, getting her father to join a bowling club and then making sure he went there and spoke to people and remembered who he was and why he had come – human contact being the only cure for the incurable.

As for the unforgiving and self-righteous phrase itself, she had assumed it was some local saying from the town of Pescara where he came from, like ‘the daintiness of the boor’, a phrase he always rolled out when someone helped himself to almost all the food on a platter, leaving a small amount for appearances. But in the days just before his mental decline became undeniable, she had asked him about his motto. It turned out it was not a local saying. He had heard it from an American pilot from the 376th Bombardment Group, who had returned after the war and set up a motorbike repair shop – in a town he had helped to wipe off the map – and given her father his first proper paying job. That shop beneath the railway embankment on Via Rieti was one of the last fragments in his blasted memory.

And Alec? How many times had she let him fool her? She thought she could give him one more chance. She was not asking for much. She did not even want to marry him, though it would be nice to be asked, and it might give Elia some more stability. But for now, she would be content if he simply lifted up his head, focused his eyes, and
saw
her. It was not an unreasonable hope. It was not even to ask something of which he was incapable. On the contrary, he was very observant of people, as long as they were not her. Or himself. About himself he had absolutely no idea.

All people, he had once told her, are neurotic or psychopathic; it was just a question of degree. Half of humanity was stuck in its own childhood, the other half in its adolescence. The people who were stuck in adolescence could be reasoned with. Not so the people stuck in childhood, which, he solemnly informed her, included all the psychopaths.

And him.

The chewing gum incident. Now that was scary. In one of his increasingly frequent raids into the kitchen, he had come across a tube of Air Fresh Vigorsol chewing gum. Hers. He didn’t even like chewing gum. He had often told her so, which she took as a criticism of the fact that she did. But he chewed his way through the entire contents. She had complained about it the morning after, and he had been very dismissive. She had perhaps upped the ante a bit too much, turning the gum into a
casus belli
.

That evening, she had opened the cupboard to take out some pasta, and there, occupying the entire top shelf were five industrial-sized sealed plastic packs of chewing gum. Hundreds of packets. Thousands of pieces, enough for a lifetime.

She knew he had his answers all prepared. ‘I thought, seeing as chewing gum means so much to you . . .’ She could almost hear him saying it. So she said nothing. She never touched or mentioned them, and two weeks later threw them all out.

Whereas she should have thrown him out instead.

Three weeks later, he apologized for his stunt.

Fool me a hundred times, shame on me. When she thought of him now, she saw him standing in the kitchen gulping down water, slightly stooped to de-emphasize his height, his big face wracked with despair and the pain of migraine as he tried to pretend he was just fine. Except he wasn’t there, was he? That’s why she had to imagine him standing by her bedside. Nor could she relax in the knowledge that he would be there for Elia, protecting him if something terrible happened her, as it almost had. He was not to be trusted.

He was no father to Elia, but he might learn to be a father yet. She knew he wanted to become one. Once, after they had made love all afternoon, she had found a used condom under the bed. He was usually so fastidious about getting rid of them. He hated them. He made jokes about it being like ‘washing your feet with socks on’ and all the usual masculine objections, but they revolted and frightened him. She could see that from the way he had to leave the bed immediately and remove them, wrap them up, throw them away, and wash. Except this once, when they had spent almost an entire day in bed, and he had begun to relax, and she found one, used, curled up like an onion peel under the bed, and she had picked it up with considerable less fastidiousness than he did, only to find it was split. Split and therefore relatively clean of semen.